


Imago

by Liquid_Lyrium



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Angst and Humor, Animal Metaphors, Aziraphale Loves Crowley (Good Omens), Butterflies, Canon-Typical Eldritch Alcohol abuse, Crowley has Trauma from the Fall (Good Omens), Drunk Crowley (Good Omens), M/M, MoFu Bingo, More horrifying animal facts with Lyrium, Other, Prompt Fill, is the closest tag to 'Crowley's drunken ramblings', mofu bingo 2021
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-14 00:08:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29162442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liquid_Lyrium/pseuds/Liquid_Lyrium
Summary: “Butterflies,” Crowley says, apropos of nothing.“Butterflies?” Aziraphale repeats with an owlish blink. They’ve been drinking for a solid seven hours now, and have been sitting in comfortable silence for about three. Crowley is currently half-melted into a lazy sprawl of black along the whole length of the Chesterfield.“Yeah. It’s like butterflies,” he says with a satisfied sort of nod. As if he’s threaded a particularly difficult needle of language. As if he’s found a clever answer to a question.---In which an angel and a demon have a perfectly normal conversation.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 41
Kudos: 78
Collections: MoFu Bingo 2021





	Imago

**Author's Note:**

> _Imago_ or _Like a Butterfly Out of Hell._

“Butterflies,” Crowley says, apropos of nothing.

“Butterflies?” Aziraphale repeats with an owlish blink. They’ve been drinking for a solid seven hours now, and have been sitting in comfortable silence for about three. Crowley is currently half-melted into a lazy sprawl of black along the whole length of the Chesterfield.

“Yeah. It’s like butterflies,” he says with a satisfied sort of nod. As if he’s threaded a particularly difficult needle of language. As if he’s found a clever answer to a question.

“Butterflies?” Aziraphale repeats again, trying to keep the slur out of his voice, hoping to convey his confusion.

“Yup.” Crowley reaches down to the floor and lets his fingers catch on a wine bottle. He lets it sit on his chest for a moment before he takes a drink. “Wot you think about ‘em, angel?”

“I don’t—” Aziraphale has no idea where this conversation is headed. It sounds like Crowley is leading up to one of his grandiloquent drunken speeches. Or possibly a diatribe. Bit of a coin flip, really. Sometimes it’s delightful, sometimes it’s irritating, and sometimes there’s a third side of the coin where it’s wounding. “I like all God’s creatures. ‘S a tiny thing. Don’t tell me you don’t like butterflies! I shan’t have it!”

Crowley scoffs with fanged teeth and ripples onto his feet with a dangerous sway. “Should’ve known _you’d_ like them. Everybody likes _butterflies_!” He utters the word with contempt.

“They’re _pretty_ ,” Aziraphale says with hot cheeks, feeling incredibly shallow for a six thousand year old being who can see the very fabric of creation. “And they’re an important part of the ecologic-ecosysmatic-ecolologic-echolocate—they have sex. With the flowers.”

There’s another snort from the demon, “More like they’re _marital aids_ to the flowers. And they’re not _pretty_. They’re _monstrous.”_

Aziraphale frowns, putting his wineglass down. “Monstrous!?”

“Have you ever looked at their mouths?” Crowley sticks out an incredibly long, thin, snake-forked tongue and curls it into a loose coil. “Wi’ the’ thothothcith?”

_“What?”_

Crowley rolls his eyes and his tongue zips back into his mouth like an elastic cable cut from tension. “With their _proboscis_ , keep up, angel!”

“What’s wrong with their proboscises? Probosci?”

“‘S weird. Having their mouths on the outside like that. You know they taste with their feet? And there’s their hairy little bodies and their wire-thin legs and weird proportions… And everyone fucking _loves_ them!”

“I don’t think the blueprint for butterflies is that unseemly or unusual,” Aziraphale points out mildly. “There are far more species of insect on this planet than people or kangaroos or emus or—”

“They’re _hideous,_ ” Crowley insists, stalking around the back room, working himself up into a properly demonic fury. “You know how they’re made, right?”

Aziraphale follows Crowley’s pacing, and it almost makes him ill to track the motion. “I… oh, do slow down, please, my dear! You’re making the room sway!”

Crowley grunts, but he barely halts for more than a heartbeat. “They eat themselves.”

“Eat themselves!?” Aziraphale repeats, alarmed.

“Well, no,” Crowley reasons aloud to himself. “They just break down all their tissues and turn into soup.”

“Soup?” Aziraphale repeats, evidently transformed into a weak echo.

“Yeah, great big pot of caterpillar goo.” Crowley makes a truly awful noise through his teeth—though what this is supposed to be indicating, Aziraphale has no idea. “They disintegrate down into… into soup! Just… all boiled up!”

Aziraphale desperately tries to remember his time on a silk farm in the Heian period. “I don’t think you’re supposed to boil them,” he says mildly. “Not unless you want silk, anyway.”

“You’re not _listening_ to me, angel!” Aziraphale is taken aback by Crowley’s sudden vehemence. So much so that he sobers up immediately, the taste of iron coating his mouth. “The point _is—_ my point _is—_ it all breaks down. Just some discs that, nh, make the production happen. Little nodes. Like a skellington, almost. ‘Cept it’s not. Imaginal discs, they call it.”

“Imaginal discs?” Aziraphale feels something like fear spider down his spine.

“Melted down, until you’re all fucking digested by your own enzymes, and-and-and all these _changes_ happening, while you’re sitting there aware the whole fucking time of being something else before—”

“Crowley.” It feels like his heart has leapt up into his mouth.

“Cause they remember it, y’know, caterpillars. Remember stuff before they go into their little cocoons. And you sit there with all the memories of how it used to be before your fucking juvenile hormones ran out, because that was the only stuff keeping the whole process at bay—”

 _“Crowley,”_ Aziraphale pleads, because he doesn’t want this. Not like this, not when Crowley is so drunk he doesn’t realize he’s answering a question Aziraphale never asked.

“Before you grew up and dared to ask questions and ask, ‘well, why shouldn’t I be something other than a mindless leaf-eating machine in a leaf-eating factory?’” Crowley rakes a hand through his hair, leaving behind a rumpled mess that makes him look positively manic. His eyes wild and swallowtail yellow from corner to corner. “Sssso, made your chrysalisss and now you get to lie in it.”

Without warning, Crowley stops his pacing and drops back onto the couch, pounding his fist on the coffee table as soon as his arse hits the leather. _“That’s_ why it’s bullshit that everyone loves butterflies! They don’t know what it—what it’s—” Crowley looks decidedly lost, bewildered and in pain. “It’s all goo. Disgusting, putrid, ugly _soup!_ And people only like them because they don’t know better!” 

The silence that falls between them sends terrible, steel-cold goosebumps all down Aziraphale’s body. The moment he cautiously raises his eyes to meet Crowley’s, the demon looks away, flopping down and rolling over to face the back of the couch. “....Yeah, so just… think butterflies are overrated, ‘s all. Moths are on thin ice, too.”

Aziraphale twists his hands nervously. Crowley hit the third side of the coin, but the worst of its edge came down on him. “You know, I find that I still do rather like butterflies, even given all that.”

Crowley scoffs, and his shoulders tighten up towards his ears. “You just like how it looks at the end. Nobody likes the disgusting bits in the middle.”

“On the contrary, my dear boy,” Aziraphale says gently. “It’s really quite remarkable that the caterpillar can survive all that. The transformation process… well, it only helps me appreciate the butterfly that much more.” He holds his breath, praying he’ll be heard, that he’s said it right.

“Yeah?” Crowley finally asks, his voice the quietest thing Aziraphale has ever heard.

“Yes, to undergo such a radical transformation must be… shocking, to say the least.” Aziraphale clears his throat. “That a butterfly still comes out so beautiful and gentle… and yes, even wiry-legged and oddly proportioned… it’s nothing short of a—” He swallows thickly. It’s a gamble, but he doesn’t know any other word to describe it. “A miracle.”

There is a long sigh from the couch, and a curious sort of shifting to Crowley’s shoulders. Aziraphale realizes the demon must have sobered up, because when he pushes himself up and swings his legs over the couch, his eyes are clear for the split second Aziraphale sees them. The sunglasses go back in place, black like the wings of an emperor butterfly. “I should go,” Crowley says blandly to his knees.

“All right.”

Neither of them move.

Butterflies, it strikes Aziraphale as he studies Crowley, are fragile things, as well as beautiful.

“...Sorry I made it weird.” Crowley pushes himself to his feet, hands brushing over his legs. Toothpick thin and far too long, and before Aziraphale can even protest or tell Crowley he has nothing to be ashamed of, he’s fluttered his way out the door. Aziraphale hears the engine of the Bentley roar to life, grow louder, and then fade away as the demon makes his escape into the wild.

**Author's Note:**

> First off - thank you to Waterofthemoon for betaing this for me!!
> 
> Written for the MonsterF***er Bingo call of Slime/Goo. Y'all. I am a huge weenie and have a terrible phobia of insects. Usually I can handle (some) moths and butterflies, but there are days when butterflies also make my skin crawl lol. But yes, they are terrifying and a good analogy for our dear Crowley. Puddle of caterpillar goo? Puddle of Sulphur? Same difference. ALSO LIKE. YOU KNOW THEIR WINGS ARE MADE UP OF TINY SCALES?? *a hundred eyeball emoji*
> 
>   
> Anyways here are some more horrifying butterfly facts that did not make it into the fic:
> 
> So caterpillars shed/molt about 5 times before going into a cocoon or chrysalis. They have a hormone called juvenile hormone that slowly depletes as they get older. When the levels of this hormone get low enough, that's what triggers the cocoon/chrysalis formation when they get a spike of the enzymes that trigger their other molts/growth. If a caterpillar did not have this juvenile hormone, they'd basically dissolve into a puddle of goo the first time they go to molt. ALSO!! If they have a condition where they produce the juvenile hormone throughout their life, they don't go into chrysalis and eventually die of dehydration!
> 
> ALSO!! Caterpillars have been proven to remember things from before they turn into adults. Scientists found this out by pairing negative stimulus with the scent of acetone and 70-80% of butterflies avoided the scent again when confronted with it as adults. This may explain why butterflies know what plants to go lay their eggs on, even though they fill a completely different ecological niche than their offspring. Jury is still out on whether or not they're 'aware' during the process.
> 
> When are scientists going to breed one of these guys so that they produce a clear cocoon/chrysalis so we can see inside huh? There's been some work done with like, CT imaging tho.
> 
> also for the title, here is a convenient description/definition I pulled from the web:
> 
> _In biology, the **imago** is the last stage an insect attains during its metamorphosis, its process of growth and development; it also is called the **imaginal stage** , the stage in which the insect attains maturity. It follows the final ecdysis of the immature instars._


End file.
